I wonder how things would have gone if these companies had patented the features they built and then sued Twitter to prevent Twitter from implementing them. You could argue (or, I could at least) that this is what patents were made for.
Patents might have been built to protect unique and game-changing innovations simply being copied by a major plyer in the market, but they certainly weren't designed to stop people from building obvious enhancements to their product because someone else did it first.
The patent review process wouldn't work quickly enough to save them anyway.
Wait, patents are for suing someone who has actually built something (that wasn't too innovative) over something that isn't innovative at all? We are talking about rather obvious things here, after all...
